Maximizing Social Media

Attorneys are making more and more use of social media as part of their marketing campaign. Sam has been very successful with his social media campaign and other entrepreneurial attorneys should follow his blueprint. With that blueprint in mind, put in extra effort to maximize your results.

Legal Blog

Creating a legal blog is a great way to create a honeypot for potential clients and to publicize your knowledge of an area of the law. As noted in my previous post, content is by far the most important aspect of a legal blog. Your posts should provide valuable knowledge to readers and make them eager to come back for more. If you want to talk about what you had for lunch, save that for the your personal Facebook page.

If you are worried about coming up with new content, or have become bored, there are a number of ways to reignite your blog. One of the reasons Lawyerist is well-read is the number of contributors. If you know other attorneys in your practice area, ask them to write a guest post on a particular topic. Their post is good publicity for both your blog, and their own practice.

Twitter

Lawyerist contributors are fairly opinionated about the merits of using Twitter. Some think it has little value, while others feel it is a great tool that can help you network with other local attorneys. I think Twitter is so easy to use that you should use it once or twice a day (or more). You can link your legal blog to Twitter so that every new post is automatically tweeted. People reading your blog on the internet and people searching on Twitter are sometimes different audiences. With automatic tweets, you can reach diverse audiences with very little effort.

Along with automatic tweets, provide your twitter followers with something extra. Tweet a link to a worthwhile article in the New York Times, or another lawyer’s blog. While this is not as ideal as directing traffic to your own site, it still gives people a reason extra incentive to follow you on Twitter.

Be careful, however, at over exposure on Twitter. The 140 character limit can make it easy to get carried away and over tweet. Never forget that content, above all, is the most important aspect of social media campaigning. A recent experiment noted that adding tweeting more often, with the same type of content, had little impact on traffic.

Strategize

Use Google Analytics to track visits to your website or your blog. Every audience is different, but for the most part, traffic to your blog or website will die down over the weekend. For my site, I try and avoid new posts on Saturday and Sunday. By the time any twitter or RSS followers return to the internet on Monday morning, my posts are cluttered with everything else. Same thing with Monday morning and Friday afternoons, two times when people are generally prepping for the week, or wrapping it up.

Obviously, you cannot assume that every post or Tweet is of similar quality. That aside, experiment with when you post new material to maximize exposure and impact. Like every other marketing technique, your social media campaign needs purpose, direction, and solid content, to be successful.